DETERMINANTS OF EMPLOYEES' JOB SATISFACTION AND THEIR EFFECTS ON ORGANIZATIONAL COMMITMENT: THE CASE OF WALLAGA UNIVERSITY NEKEMTE COMPUS

ADVISER: PROF. RADHA KRISHNA MURTHY

This thesis aims to empirically examine the determinants of employees’ job satisfaction and their effects on organizational commitment in the case of Wallaga University Nekemte Campus. Structured questionnaires were distributed to 345 sampled respondents out of which 339 questionnaires were correctly filled and used for the analysis. A number of univariate and bivariate analyses were conducted to understand the distribution of the data on the major variables as well as to understand the relationships among the dependent and independent variables. Finally, the conventional multiple regression analysis was used to assess the determinants of organizational commitment after controlling for the employees’ socioeconomic factors. From descriptive analysis, the researcher found that the employees are majorly dissatisfied on all dimensions with the mean satisfaction level of 2.72. On the contrarily, the researcher found that the employees have moderate organizational commitment with the overall mean of 3.03. From analysis, the researcher also discovered that some socioeconomic variables which were related to employees’ job satisfaction were correlated with the organizational commitment, which proved that job satisfactions and organizational commitment are influenced by different factors. The linear regression result showed that married employees have weak organizational commitment nearly by 0.17 standard deviations than others. On the other hand, administrative staffs have greater organizational commitment by nearly 0.21 standard deviations than the academic staffs although the former groups are more likely to have lower job satisfaction level. Finally, the researcher found that all the three dimensions of employee job satisfaction (extrinsic factors, management and leadership as well as intrinsic factors) have positive and statistically significant effect on the organizational commitment. Based on the empirical results, a number of recommendations are suggested: increase the proportion of female academic staff at least to 30 percent of the total; consider promulgation of policy packages to motivate employees via appropriate remunerations, housing and creating conducive working environment; provide significantly meaningful discount and or consider provision of free education at the community school in the university and provide medication staff children; create transparent and clear system to identify best performing staffs at the end of each academic year and provide meaningful rewards to create sense of competition among the staff. The ministry of education is also strongly advised to consider revising the salary scale of academic staff substantially so as to commensurate with the ever increasing cost of living. Keywords: Job satisfaction, Organizational commitment, Wallaga University, unidimensionality.